Today in this article you will get to know the difference between 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, a previous generation GPU which is now two and a half years old. Of course, we’ll be doing so in 50 games, with some titles tested using multiple configurations, with ray tracing and upscaling enabled in some cases.
You might be wondering why this comparison is relevant, considering the 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti are “meant to be” on two different GPU classes. But the thing is, that’s just a name and companies like Nvidia and AMD commonly use their established product families to upsell gamers, and that’s exactly what’s going on here.
When the GeForce RTX 3080 launched at $700, right before the crypto boom, getting one for that price was near impossible. Later on, Nvidia decided to take advantage of the market situation by re-releasing GA102 and GA104 chips with minor spec bumps, asking $1,200 for the RTX 3080 Ti and a more reasonable $600 for the RTX 3070 Ti.
Still, many games did purchase a 10GB GeForce RTX 3080, and many are probably considering the upgrade to an RTX 40 series product, but of course, the problem is that pricing… it’s gone up, by a lot! The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti starts at $800 (MSRP), with most models going for $850 or more at retail.
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Worse still, if you want the more desirable RTX 4080, those cost $1,200 – they are supposed to cost that, but in reality, they are closer to $1,300 – ouch. Another possible situation is that you didn’t buy any GPUs during the crypto boom – smart! – and now you are ready to buy a new graphics card.
The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is pretty expensive at $800+ and while the RTX 3080 is no longer selling new, it may be attractive to buy second hand if you can find it for around $500-$550. Depending on what you own right now, this may still be considerably faster and a nice upgrade.
So, compared to the 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, does the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti have much to offer? Comparing some specs, the RTX 4070 Ti is 14% more expensive than the RTX 3080 was at launch, the die itself is 53% smaller though it manages to pack 27% more transistors thanks to the upgrade to the TSMC N4 process, a significant step up from Samsung’s 8LPP.
The GeForce 4070 Ti packs 8 times more L2 cache going from a mere 6 MB to 48 MB. The core configuration sees less CUDA cores, but IPC has been improved. The RTX 4070 Ti, out of 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, includes an extra 2GB of VRAM, taking the total to 12GB, but memory bandwidth has been significantly reduced due to a more limited 192-bit wide bus.
That’s a massive downgrade from the 320-bit wide bus on the RTX 3080, which when paired with 19 Gbps memory resulted in a bandwidth of 760 GB/s. The RTX 4070 Ti uses faster 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory, but the narrower bus sees bandwidth cut to just 504 GB/s, a big 34% reduction.
In memory sensitive scenarios, out of 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, the RTX 4070 Ti will likely suffer, and that’s something we’re going to be looking at in our benchmarks. Ultimately, we want to see how the 3080 and 4070 Ti compare across a wide range of games, so let’s go do that.
Benchmarks of 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti
Starting with Fortnite using DX11 with the Epic quality settings without any upscaling, we find that the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is 20% faster than the RTX 3080 at 1440p, which is not a big difference, and the performance uplift is in line with the price increase (MSRP at launch).
However, at 4K we see a far more substantial 62% increase for the newer RTX 4070 Ti, going from 52 fps up to a much more desirable 84 fps. Basically, without upscaling the RTX 3080’s performance is very junky at 4K with 1% lows of 29 fps, making the RTX 4070 Ti a much more capable 4K gamer in this game.
Now, this is interesting. Typically, we’ve found Fortnite to run slower using DX12, but have noted that with slower CPUs this might not be the case, but it appears as though this also applies to slower GPUs as well. At 1440p, the RTX 4070 Ti dropped 32% of its original performance with DX11, whereas the RTX 3080 dropped by 34%.
Then at 4K, the 4070 Ti ran 26% slower with DX12 and the 3080 was actually 2% faster – with a massive 59% improvement to 1% lows. The lower overhead of DX12 is helping improve minimum frame rates, but it’s capping overall performance, at least in this example.
The problem this DX12 limitation has on high-end hardware is amplified when enabling hardware ray tracing, though here we run into more odd data. Out of 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, the RTX 4070 Ti is 23% faster than the 3080 at 1440p, which is about what you’d expect to see based on previous data.
However, it’s the 4K results that are surprising: the 3080 and 4070 Ti delivered similar performance. Whereas the 4070 Ti saw a 16% reduction in performance when compared to the DX12 results with RT disabled, the 3080 saw just a 4% decline. Remember that the regular results without ray tracing did not use upscaling.
So perhaps this is a result of setting the super resolution to quality mode for the ray tracing test. Whatever the case, 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, the RTX 3080 was surprisingly impressive here. Here we have another example, this time in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, where the 4070 Ti beats the 3080 by a fairly comfortable margin at 1440p (17% here), only to match it at the more demanding 4K resolution.
The reason for this is almost certainly down to the difference in memory bandwidth, a factor that plays a key role as the resolution increases. We see a similar trend with ray tracing enabled, along with FSR 2. The 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, RTX 4070 Ti was 27% faster than the RTX 3080 at 1440p, but despite that massive win it was just 3% faster at 4K.
Performance Summary of 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti
Now it’s time to compare the 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti across all the 50 games tested. The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is on average 21% faster than the RTX 3080 10GB at 1440p, a significant uplift and what would be an amazing result if the RTX 4070 Ti didn’t cost considerably more, too.
The biggest wins for the RTX 4070 Ti came in Forza Horizon 5, Atomic Heart, Modern Warfare II, Dying Light 2 without ray tracing, Gears 5, Halo Infinite, Hitman 3 and The Callisto Protocol. The smallest wins were mostly seen when CPU limited in titles such as ACC, CSGO, PUBG, War Thunder and Hogwarts Legacy with RT disabled.
out of 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, at 4K resolution the overall margin is slightly reduced to 18% in favour of the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. Fortnite using DirectX 11 was the big outlier here, providing the 4070 Ti with a massive 62% win, though titles such as Forza Horizon 5 and Modern Warfare II were also very positive for the newer GPU.
As you’d expect, there were less CPU limited results at 4K, but there were also more instances where the among 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, RTX 4070 Ti suffered due to its more limited memory bandwidth.
Conclusion
On average, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is 19% faster than the RTX 3080 10GB, depending on the resolution, with margins typically peaking around 30 to 40%. We saw no games where the RTX 3080 beat the 4070 Ti, but there were a few titles where performance was almost the same.
Looking back at our day-one review for the RTX 4070 Ti, we found that on average it was 21% faster than the RTX 3080 10GB at 4K, so despite expanding our testing from 16 to 50 games, we’ve found the same kind of margins. This is a somewhat disappointing result that demonstrates how underwhelming this latest GPU generation is from a value perspective.
At MSRP, 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is a mere 5% improvement in cost per frame when compared to the RTX 3080, giving games about the same level of value two and a half years later. In fact, it’s worse than that because at present the RTX 4070 Ti typically costs $850, making it 2% more costly per frame when compared to the older RTX 3080.
At least you get DLSS 3 Frame Generation (that’s sarcasm right there). We are sure that’s not going to incentivize anyone into spending more on a 4070 Ti or RTX 4080. You would have to be coming from, 4070 Ti vs 3080 Ti, an RTX 2080 or 2080 Super for the 4070 Ti to make sense.
Those used to cost $700 – $800 at MSRP, and while they didn’t represent good value when compared to the Pascal generation that came before, going from a 2080 series graphics card to a 4070 Ti for roughly the same money would be a massive upgrade in absolute FPS.
